Iuliia Petelina

A foreign language unit in the media discourse and the problems of translating it into Russian

The present study examined the presence of foreign lingual units belonging to different languages in the modern British media texts, their thematic features and origin, and the variants of their translation in the corresponding Russian media papers and contextual influence on the ways of translation.

100 foreign language units were found out in the news articles by means of a continuous sampling method. They were analyzed in accordance with such criteria as: the original language, linguistic characteristics, and thematic features. Then, their translated variants were studied due to the various translation techniques and methods.

The results of the analysis show the most frequent foreign language units presented or mentioned  in the British news discourse come from Oriental, Scandinavian, Slavic, Romance cultures. Primarily, such presence is related to the political and social events taking place in the world.  Most of them are personal names, names of geographical locations, foreign institutions, precedent names, situations and phenomena as well as culture-specific concepts. Their translation match depends on the following factors: linguistic laws and translation patterns, contextual peculiarities and political correctness.

The research revealed the rare cases of foreign common names in the English media discourse, as the authors of the articles tend to use the native language words, to denote the corresponding notions. But, if a foreign common name is unavoidable and still a case, its transcription and transliteration appear to be the most popular methods of their translation.